When jobs or inflation information counter President Donald Trump’s most well-liked financial narrative, he usually presents various statistics to shine a extra optimistic gentle on the economic system. But Trump’s newest effort asks Americans to purchase into some puzzling logic.
After America’s unemployment rate hit a four-year high of 4.6% in November, Trump made the argument that the job market is much better than it seems. His reasoning: He may rapidly put thousands and thousands of Americans to again to work – however received’t.
“Now, if I want to make some good numbers, I’ll add 300,000 jobs. I can do it with one phone call,” Trump stated at a campaign-style rally in North Carolina Friday.
He stated, if he needed to, he may power authorities businesses so as to add jobs that they misplaced this 12 months by means of a mix of resignations, attrition and staffing reductions led by the Department of Government Efficiency.
“They’ll hire them immediately. They’ll pour in. And the 4.5% would be down to 2.5% in a matter of moments. I could get it down to zero – hire a couple of million workers,” Trump stated. “But that’s the destruction of a country.”
Trump’s argument incorporates quite a few factual errors. That’s no shock, contemplating he has been second guessing jobs statistics for a decade – from when he falsely acknowledged throughout the 2016 presidential marketing campaign that the jobless rate was 42%, to when he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner this summer time over revisions that confirmed the labor market was worse off than beforehand anticipated.
But the most important drawback with Trump’s message is he as soon as once more is asking individuals to disregard their lived experiences of a weakening job market – and imagine in an alternate portrait of America’s economic system that doesn’t match actuality.
Trump got various the details unsuitable in his latest unemployment rate denial – the least of which is that the unemployment rate stands at 4.6%, in response to the BLS, not 4.5%, as he acknowledged.
Trump stated he may get the unemployment rate all the way down to 2.5% by rehiring all 271,000 employees eradicated from US authorities payrolls this 12 months. But Trump was off by an element of 13 – federal businesses would wish to make use of 3.5 million extra individuals to perform that. (Only 2.7 million individuals at the moment work for the US authorities, and the the federal authorities has by no means employed greater than 3.4 million individuals.)
Rehiring for all the 271,000 misplaced federal employee positions would take the unemployment rate all the way down to just 4.4%.
To get the unemployment rate all the way down to “zero,” it could take greater than the couple of million authorities workers that Trump urged: Federal businesses would wish so as to add 7.8 million positions. Zero unemployment has by no means come near taking place – the lowest US unemployment rate ever recorded was 2.5%, final achieved in June 1953.
The motive the unemployment rate has risen to 4.6% from 4% when Trump took workplace is as a result of there have been 982,000 extra unemployed individuals in November than in January. Government work is liable for just a fraction of that.
So Trump’s math is significantly fuzzy – however so is his underlying message that the US job market is considerably stronger than the unemployment rate suggests.
The US economic system has lost jobs in three of the previous six months, and 2025 is on tempo to publish the worst job growth since 2020.
The lived expertise of most individuals in the labor power additionally exhibits the job market is caught: People who don’t have work are more and more complaining that they will’t get a job, and folk who’ve a job are cleaving to them tightly.
The period of quiet quitting is over. Quitting, usually, has been out of vogue this 12 months, as individuals keep of their jobs for longer: The rate of employees who voluntarily stop their jobs fell to a five-year low in October.
Exacerbating America’s caught job market is a mismatch between the industries which can be hiring and people who find themselves unemployed. For instance, jobs are rising in the well being care trade, however an rising variety of employees in the leisure, transportation and manufacturing sectors are out of a job.
In different phrases: Who cares if there are nursing jobs should you’re skilled as a manufacturing unit or resort employee?
The jobs state of affairs is worse for lower-income employees than high-income workers, and Black unemployment is beginning to surge – it rose above 8% in November for the first time in 4 years.
By denying the financial actuality that persons are experiencing of their on a regular basis lives, Trump is muddying his financial message and making the same political mistake that haunted his predecessor, former President Joe Biden and contributed to the Democrats dropping the White House in 2024.
Trump has had a decade-long battle with the reality about the unemployment rate and different jobs information.
As the unemployment rate was falling under 5% throughout his 2016 presidential marketing campaign, Trump falsely acknowledged, “The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42%.”
But in March 2017, after the first full jobs report of Trump’s presidency was launched, the unemployment rate fell to 4.7% from 4.8%. So Trump then claimed that the supposedly “fake” numbers of the previous have been now “real.”
“I talked to the president prior to this and he said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,’” said Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, on March 10, 2017.
In August 2024, throughout his most up-to-date presidential marketing campaign, Trump complained a couple of preliminary annual revision to Biden’s jobs numbers that confirmed the US economic system had added 818,000 fewer jobs over the earlier 12 months than earlier reported. Trump in a Truth Social post incorrectly referred to as that revision a “record” – a 902,000-job revision in 2009 was larger. And the closing 2024 revision, issued in February, confirmed that the 2024 information was overestimated by solely 589,000 jobs.
In August of this 12 months, Trump fired then-BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, whom he accused, with out proof, of manipulating the month-to-month jobs experiences for “political purposes.” In that month’s report, the BLS revised down the beforehand reported features for May and June by a mixed 258,000 jobs.
Those revisions, although traditionally massive, were not unprecedented. Weaker-than-expected hiring, sampling errors and low survey responses could make the jobs report more difficult to estimate. But the BLS continues to gather the payroll information because it’s reported, and it revises the information accordingly.
Calling into query the validity of official information may undermine the authorities’s essential position in serving to companies make knowledgeable choices about hiring. It’s additionally a doubtful political tactic – Trump’s claims that the US job market is healthier than it truly is may sow doubts about his personal credibility, notably on the economic system, which is certainly one of his most susceptible points with voters in the midterm elections.